Muriel's Wedding - Trailer
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TWENTY years ago, Paul Keating was sitting in the PM’s chair, Christopher Skase was on the run, Blue Heelers premiered on TV, our phone numbers gained a couple of extra digits and Aussie filmmakers took a lot of risks: making movies about gay blokes, drag queens and daydreaming Dancing Queens.

Many of the risks paid off, big time. In fact, casting an eye back over the films our country produced in 1994, you’ve got wonder ... was it Australia’s best movie year, ever?

Consider the evidence:

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

The film that took Aussie cinema’s reputation for “quirky” to glittering new heights and took LGBT stories to the mainstream. Drag queen performers Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce) and transsexual Bernadette (Terence Stamp) take a bus trip through the vast interior of Australia to reach Alice Springs, along the way interacting with the locals, confronting homophobia and performing some superbly camp musical numbers (I Will Survive and Finally among them). Filming locations included Broken Hill, Coober Pedy and King’s Canyon. Twenty years after its release, this clash-of-cultures classic still boasts a 93 per cent Fresh rating on movie review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. Key images from Priscilla featured in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony in 2000 and it has been turned into a stage musical.

Local gross: $16.5 million (equivalent of $25 million-plus today puts it on par with recent hit The Great Gatsby)

Loud and proud ... Guy Pearce, Terence Stamp and Hugo Weaving in a scene from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Picture: SuppliedSource: News Corp Australia

Muriel’s Wedding

It revived the chart fortunes of ABBA. It made “You’re terrible, Muriel” as much a part of the Aussie lexicon as “G’day mate”. It set Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths on the path to long and acclaimed international careers and made PJ Hogan the rom-com director of choice (for a while, at least). But while most moviegoers’ memories of Muriel’s Wedding are as bright and happy as the confetti in the poster, it was actually pretty dark: Muriel (Collette) is an awkward, overweight and often pathetic figure. She spends her days in Porpoise Spit listening to ABBA and dreaming of a glamorous wedding. Her politician dad is a bully and her so-called friends are bitchy, but she doesn’t exactly behave like an angel, either. After stealing money from her dad to pay for an island holiday, Muriel runs away to Sydney with her far more outgoing new mate, Rhonda (Griffiths).

Local gross: $15.8 million (equivalent of $24 million-plus today puts it ahead of Red Dog)

Harry (Jack Thompson) and his son Jeff (Russell Crowe) are regular, knockabout Aussie blokes who like rugby, beer and barbecues. Jeff just happens to be gay. Harry is entirely supportive — so supportive, in fact, he’d probably be writing his son’s e-dating profile were the film set today. Harry offers an “Up ya bum!” by way of cheers when Jeff brings a date (John Polson) home for a drink. The film veers from gentle commentary on masculinity, father-son relationships and acceptance to serious meditation on the ties that bind when Harry suffers a stroke. David Stevens, who also wrote Breaker Morant, wrote The Sum of Us based on his own stage play. Crowe had been hot property since Romper Stomper was released two years prior; The Sum of Us was his last local production before he gave Hollywood a try.

Local gross: $3.3 million (equivalent of $5 million-plus today puts it just behind Kath & Kimderella)

Side note: Russell Crowe might have been acting the part of Jack Thompson’s son, but it’s hard to discount the chance of some shared DNA in real life: Rusty grows more Thommo-like with every passing year.

Was Bill Hunter in it? No

Groundbreaking move ... Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe in the film The Sum of Us.Source: News Corp Australia

Sirens

More commonly known as the film in which we got to see Elle Macpherson’s boobs. While writer-director John Duigan gave McPherson her first real acting gig in Sirens — and both Kate Fischer and Portia de Rossi their first screen roles — he scores bigger points for clocking Hugh Grant just before the Englishman exploded via Four Weddings and a Funeral. While the initial buzz was all about Macpherson, by the time Sirens was released internationally Grant was pretty much the biggest star on the planet. Grant plays a 1930s reverend who likes to consider himself forward-thinking, until he’s asked to travel to the home of artist Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill) to request he withdraw a blasphemous painting from an exhibit. There the rev and his wife (Tara Fitzgerald) experience something of a sexual awakening thanks to the artist and his three “muses”. Either sensual or softcore silliness, depending on your point of view.

Local gross: $2.8 million (equivalent of $4.2 million-plus today puts it in the vicinity of Animal Kingdom)

Side note: Duigan said he didn’t “set out to cast Macpherson”, but when she became available, he gave her a testing audition. “It would have been foolish of me to cast her just because she looks great,” he told a UK newspaper.

Geoffrey Wright’s suitably gritty follow-up to Romper Stomper was much-anticipated, but is remembered as an underperformer. Perhaps that’s because it was either behind or ahead of its time: was it Mad Max for the angsty grunge generation or Fast & Furious set in the western suburbs? The story centred on Joe (Aden Young), a shy kid who goes “psycho” after falling in with the wrong crowd at his new supermarket job — including petrolhead and womaniser Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) and Satan worshipper Savina (Tara Morice). It took another decade and a half, at least, before either Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom, The Dark Knight Rises) or Young (Rectify) really started to win international acclaim.

Local gross: $883,521 (equivalent of $1.4 million-plus today puts in on par with last year’s Goddess)

Lightning Jack didn’t exactly strike twice with this attempt to find Paul Hogan a “Hollywood” gig after Crocodile Dundee. Hoges wanted to make a western and even created a company to list on the stock market in order to fund it. The film’s story goes that Jack (Hoges) is an Aussie who can’t get any respect as an outlaw in the American west. After kidnapping a mute (Cuba Gooding Jr) he trains the kid so they can pull off a famous bank robbery.

Local gross: $6.4 million (equivalent of $10 million plus today puts it halfway between Bran Nue Dae and Tomorrow, When the War Began)

US gross: $18.1 million, which would be a coup for any Aussie film. But that was about $340 million behind the biggest film of 1994 in the US, Forrest Gump.

Writer-director Bill Bennett took an old formula — the odd-couple road trip comedy — and gave it a fresh Aussie spin. Rose is an elderly woman who has been in hospital since losing her husband in a car crash. Spider (Simon Bossell) is a heavy metal-loving ambulance driver who’s peeved he has to drive the old biddy halfway across NSW when he’s got a party to go to: “Buckle up, gran!” As it was un-Australian to not love Ruth Cracknell (the star of Mother and Son for six seasons and countless repeats), the film had a built-in audience. But it was very much an indie compared to the other big-note releases of 1994.

Local gross: $856,095 (equivalent of $1.3 million plus today puts it ahead of last year’s The Turning)

Side note: Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie’s next job after Spider & Rose? Babe. His next job after the Babe sequel? The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

While none of these films today sits among the Top 10 highest-grossing Australian films of all time, as a collective the Class of 1994 stands out for breaking new ground without sacrificing populism. It must also surely stand as a landmark year as far as the amount of local talent it exposed to international audiences for the first time.

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